Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on his work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
Best non-fiction opening that sounds like a threat.
Wait, I read this! Can't remember the name of the book right now though.
Edit: Ok, I remember it from a screenshot in a thread about cheeky textbooks
Yeah, it's an oldie.
Fun fact, Boltzmann hung himself while Ehrenfest shot his 15 year old son and then himself.
Fun fact,
You and I go to different parties
it hits differently these days, but: "The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel" -William Gibson, Neuromancer
Neil Gaiman makes a reference to that in Neverwhere, using 'TV tuned to a dead channel' to describe a cloudless blue sky.
I think the hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy opener is my favorite, but a close second is Albert Camus'
Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.
The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.
Blood Rites, book 6 of The Dresden Files
Creepy weirdo that writes copaganda but damned if that sequence doesn't slap.
If Zoey Ashe had known she was being stalked by a man who intended to kill her and then slowly eat her bones, she would have worried more about that and less about getting her cat off the roof.
– Jason Pargin, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits
Speaking of Iain m banks, the paragraph about an outside context problem is one of my favourite openings he's done. "An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop"
My favorite opening lines that I didn't see yet are:
Kafka's "Metamorphosis"
“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed”
Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina"
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
And, Gibson's "Neuromancer"
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
I especially like that line in Neuromancer because at the time he wrote it, his audience would've understood he meant TV snow. Meaning the sky was overcast, giving a gloomy mood. But younger people now will think of that featureless blue that modern TVs use, which indicates a beautiful cloudless day. Totally different mood!
This is my favorite opening line:
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
He may know how to start a book but he can't end one to save his life.
I absolutely love the opening of The Martian by Andy Weir
I’m pretty much fucked. That’s my considered opinion. Fucked. Six days into what should be one of the greatest two months of my life, and it’s turned into a nightmare. I don’t even know who’ll read this. I guess someone will find it eventually. Maybe a hundred years from now. For the record…I didn’t die on Sol 6. Certainly the rest of the crew thought I did, and I can’t blame them. Maybe there’ll be a day of national mourning for me, and my Wikipedia page will say, “Mark Watney is the only human being to have died on Mars.”
"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." Stephen King
Well, not the first line per se, but the first chapter of Snowcrash is easily one of my favorites ever.
If I had to pick an opening like though, it would be:
"In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit."
I don’t think it’s technically the very first line in the book, but The Way of Kings’ “Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, wore white on the day he was to kill a king.” still gives me chills.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. First, I visited my wife's grave. Then, I joined the army.
I was going to post Neuromancer too, but everyone posted that.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs, began to take hold.
Fear and loathing in las vegas
Here's an obscure one from See you next Pluterday:
Sam was scratching desperately at the crumbling edge of the abyss. With fear he felt the cramp slowly, but surely, reaching his fingertips. He fell... And...To be quite honest, Sam was not hanging at all above an abyss. And there was no cramp at all in his fingertips. For miles around there wasn’t even a trace of an abyss at whose edge one could scratch in despair. But recently I met with a publisher who confided to me that in judging a manuscript he only glanced at the first sentence. He mustbe on tenterhooks by now.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
1984
The clocks striking 13 times immediately makes something feel off
I know it gets shit on but I legitimately like, "it was a dark and stormy night." There's a reason it became cliche. It's very evocative.
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.
Every single book (all fifteen of them!) in the WoT series starts the same exact way, and I respect the dedication to consistency.
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
Can't believe no one has yet proferred the classic:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
"The small boys came early to the hanging."
Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini
I AM DOOMED to remember a boy with a wrecked voice-not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
A Prayer For Owen Meany
-- John Irving
The first line of Shirley Jackson's Haunting Of Hill House is a banger, the complete first paragraph is incredible.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone
Ive long found something amusing about Seveneves's opening line being "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason".
"It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men."
Good book if you want something a bit like Harry Potter but aimed at a more mature audience and not funding the stripping away of human rights.
Damn, this post honestly reminded me why I love reading. Thanks for that.
The second cataclysm began in my eleventh life, in 1996. I was dying my usual death, slipping away in a warm morphine haze, which she interrupted like an ice cube down my spine.
— the first fifteen lives of Harry August, by Claire North
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